Saving
Israel from being driven
into the sea
By
Jonathan
Power
December 13, 2002
LONDON - There is a telling passage in the latest book by
Patrick Buchanan - the former ultra right wing Republican
presidential candidate, who actually often speaks a lot
of sense. He tells of visiting the disgraced but still
astute ex-president Richard Nixon. Just before they take
their leave Buchanan's wife asks Nixon a question. "What
do you think are the prospects for Israel's future
existence"? "He extended his right fist, thumb up",
Buchanan writes, "in the manner of a Roman emperor
passing sentence on a gladiator, and slowly turned his
thumb over and down."
Hamas, the radical anti-Arafat fighting group in
Palestine, has always asserted- at least until its
remarkable volte-face in Cairo a month ago- that they
were determined to drive Israel into the Mediterranean.
For them 700 years of Arab ownership of all of old
Palestine cannot be overturned by the romantic-religious
decision of the British foreign minister Stanley Balfour
and his prime minister, Lloyd George, to allow the Jews
to create a homeland on the territory of the then
recently defeated Turkish Empire. But now it appears a
new force has picked up the baton that Hamas perhaps has
dropped. It is Al Qaeda. The bombing of the Jewish
holiday retreat in Kenya and the recent pronouncements
from Osama bin Laden's inner circle suggest that Israel
will be a more serious target for future atrocities. And
bin Laden makes no bones about his ambition- to push the
Jews into the sea.
Nevertheless, we live in fast moving times. Very
senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic now
realize the dangerous predicament that Israel through its
stubbornness has got itself into. Even intimates of the
Bush family, in particular Brent Scowcroft, the still
influential ex national security advisor to the elder
George Bush, believe that this is the time for the U.S.
to make a major move to broker a final peace between the
Israelis and the Palestinians. "It would show U.S.
determination to deal with the one issue that is the
primary lens through which the Arab world views the
United States", he recently wrote. This, he says, in a
masterfully calm understatement, "would reduce the appeal
of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and the negative
reaction that would ensue should force against Iraq prove
necessary".
Given all we know about the degree of antipathy for
the U.S. that now runs through whole swathes of the Arab
and Islamic peoples such an initiative would not come a
moment too late. How could a majority of the Islamic
people not be worked up? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of
Israel is on the public record as saying 70% of the West
Bank should be part of Israel, which would leave a future
Palestine state with a small fraction of what it
rightfully considers its possession. Even when he is in a
conciliatory mood he talks of a Palestine that covers
only 40% of the West Bank and 70% of Gaza. The process of
Jewish settlement on the West Bank, which the first Bush
administration tried hard to stop, even threatening to
suspend aid to Israel in the effort, has skyrocketed
under Sharon. As the Financial Times recently reported,
"A situation in which Jewish settlements existed as
islands in a Palestinian sea is giving way to one of
Palestinian islands in a sea of settlements."
This was not how the authors of the misconceived
Balfour Declaration saw it. This is not how the
membership of the UN saw it (including all the permanent
members of the Security Council) when they voted for the
partition of Palestine in 1947. And in fact it is not how
most of the top policy makers of the Bush administration
see it, exempting Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
We have little time left to escape the two equally
awful choices that are coming to confront us: the driving
of the Palestinians off most of their historic homeland
or the driving of Israel into the sea. Everyone,
exempting bin Laden and Sharon- including now Yasser
Arafat and certainly including a majority of Israeli
public opinion to judge from the polls- knows that the
solution was mapped out on Bill Clinton's table at Camp
David. And equally, everyone with knowledge of the
negotiations knows of the refinements to that historic
enterprise successfully worked out between the two sides
at Taba in Egypt a few months later. And also everyone
knows that the statement made in February by Crown Prince
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia removes the great worry of both
Arafat and Clinton that the heavyweights in the Arab
world might not accept such a deal.
Despite the violence, despite the suicide bombers and
the atrocities of the Israeli army, despite the obsession
of the White House to get Saddam Hussein out of the way
before they think about anything else, the time could not
be riper for a final settlement. It will take from
Washington, as Scowcroft says, "the same kind of skill,
audacity and laser-like attention" given to persuading
the Security Council to line up behind America on the
disarming of Iraq. The inference of what Scowcroft is
saying is this: if Secretary of State Colin Powell could
persuade President George Bush to take Iraq to the UN he
can persuade him to bring Israel and the Palestinians to
a final negotiating table.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|